Bouchette, a Hillsboro artist who studied at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, will display her work during this year's Pacific Art Experiment at Pacific University, where viewers will navigate through a maze of drawings created from behind the wheel of a truck. Though she began her career as an artist primarily painting portraits and landscapes, Bouchette fell in love with experimental art during courses a few years ago and wondered how she could use her truck to create art. "I had two classes that really shook me up," she said. "Then a third teacher taught me I didn't have to justify being an abstract artist."The daughter of a traveling salesman in Wisconsin, Bouchette said riding along often with her father and taking family trips across the country spiked an interest in motion and energy. Inspired by that curiosity, Bouchette began experimenting with her vehicle. First she dragged pens behind the truck, but it limited how she could drive. Then, she tried dangling pens from the truck's canopy, which showed some motion.

View full sizeDeborah Bouchette looks out the back window of her canopied truck that carries "Chaucer," the device made from PVC and dangling pens that creates her art on silk panels. Her art is on display at Pacific University's Kathrin Cawein Gallery of Art. Bouchette is this year's artist for the Pacific Art Experiment at the university.Michal Thompson/Forest Grove Leader

Finally, she started to play with PVC pipes, gluing them together and creating arms that rotate naturally and dangling pens to create an apparatus to create marks that varied in stroke and intensity as Bouchette drove. "It sort of looks like a crab in a way," she said. Then she decided it needed a name that described how it tells the tales of travel. "It's sort of driven by chance," she said. "So I went, 'Chance...Chancey...Chaucer!'" In addition to the device fitted on her truck, Bouchette has used a car version of Chaucer and a backpack model to use while she hiked in Alaska. In March, Bouchette will help Pacific University students build their own Chaucers to use around campus. "We'll have 20 of these running around Pacific," she said. "It will be really fun to watch."

If You Go

What: Pacific Art Experiment

When: Reception at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 6; exhibit on disply through March, Tuesdays through Saturdays from 1-5 p.m.

Where: Kathrin Cawein Gallery of Art, 2043 College Way in Forest Grove

The Pacific Art Experiment, through which Bouchette will work with the students, began last year as a way to bring new artistic styles to Pacific University students, said Doug Anderson, the associate professor who developed the program.In addition to an exhibit at the Kathrin Cawein Gallery of Art, Bouchette will conduct workshops with students enrolled in drawing and design courses. "I think our society kind of squeezes down what we perceive as art to what looks like a picture you took," Anderson said. "I'm trying to expand their appreciation of what art can be." For Bouchette, it's in the curve of a highway ramp, a quick stop and the jostle of a truck bumping over potholes. "There all these mitigating factors and all these subtleties I can adjust," she said. "No two drawings can be the same."